Review Santa Fe: Yiorgos Kordakis

Review Santa Fe: Yiorgos Kordakis by Aline SmithsonAugust 7, 2012

Over the next month, I will be sharing the work of photographers who attended Review Santa Fe in June. Review Santa Fe is the only juried review in the United States and invites 100 photographers to Santa Fe for a long weekend of reviews, insights, and connections.

Greek photographer, Yiorgos Kordakis, lives and works in Greece and New York. He attended college in Italy and London, which reflects why his work has such a universal appeal and focus. Using 4×5 Instant Polaroid and Fuji film, Yiorgos captures the world with a bleached out, timeless approach that evokes feelings of memory and time passing. I am featuring two of Yiorgos’ series, 10,000 American Movies, where he rediscovers the US landscape stimulated by memories of American movies, and Global Summer.

Images from 10,000 American Movies

10,000 American Movies: I always find it to be a unique experience when I touch upon US soil. I call it familiarity. I am acquainted with everything. I have been here before. Perhaps I even grew up here. In a way, I think I did. And that’s because of the thousands of American movies I have been watching since I was a little kid. America feels like I am on set on its own and I am the action. I’m racing through the endless highways of the State of Texas, I book myself in cheap motel rooms on the road, I eat pancakes at desert diners in small desolate Midwest towns, I seek parking lots cramped with old, faded, street mural advertising all in search for the America that I know. The country that I saw flickering across the screens of movie theatres and TV back at home in Greece.

For the past four years, I have been driving across the country reliving each American movie scene I had in my mind. I thought I was the action, but I learned that I was becoming the direction. I started to physically explore America.

My images represent thousands of little movie moments, which are deeply rooted into my memory. I am not looking for a movie location. I’m looking for the reflection of reality in the mirror of film. In my eyes and lens, this is a country that seems like an endless movie set.